Full disclosure requires him to establish at the outset that he is certainly not within the intended audience for this movie. He's left of center, has watched Michael Moore documentaries and Keith Olbermann Special Comments without gastric distress. He went to the movie pledging to advance it half a letter grade for free, as compensation for any jokes he might have been too much of a liberal weenie to laugh at.

So here's the plot.

Grandpa (Leslie Nielsen) narrates a Dickensian fairy tale about documentary filmmaker Michael Malone (Farley), a big fat slob in a baseball cap whose resemblance to a certain real-life documentary filmmaker is not only intended but belabored. Malone can't get laid, and eats everything within reach, including pizza slices covered in mouse droppings. We are told many times that he never showers and that he hoards Twinkies and that he tries to grope shapely young women and that he hates the troops and that nobody cares about what he thinks anyway, since who gives a damn about documentaries anyway? (This last point is given special emphasis, throughout. Ha, ha.)

Malone's current project is, of course, a rally to ban the Fourth of July. (Gee, that's nuance.) One of the big early laugh moments is a Girl Scout calling him "a fat ignorant America-hating sack of s--t," and if you know in advance that this note will also be rung often, you can suck down that supersized soda free of fear that frequent bathroom trips will ruin your appreciation of the plot.

He also ends up stupidly collaborating with Al Qaeda, introduced in scenes set in Afghanistan as a bunch of silly guys in robes who are, for the most part, all saddled with the first name Muhammad and the last name Hussein. (Ha, ha.)

This all changes when the spirit of John F. Kennedy (Chris Anglinn) steps through Malone's TV set to announce the coming of three ghosts who will teach the stupid, twinkie-eating lib the error of his ways. He also calls Malone a "douchebag."

So what you're getting, really, is Dickens re-imagined for Fox News movie night.

Wacky hijinks at Ground Zero

The first problem, politically neutral, is that any slob character is much funnier challenging the voices of authority than he is when the voices of authority wag their fingers at him. The second is that nobody except the idiot Michael Moore caricature is allowed even the failed attempt to be funny; everybody else engaged in teaching Malone the error of his ways must be earnest and heartfelt and, at most, irked by his inability to learn. So we get lectures from Gen. George Patton (Grammer), George Washington (Voight) and the Angel of Death (Adkins), which are all interrupted by various manifestations of Malone Not Getting It. Ha, ha, ha.

It was always possible for this to be funny. Team America took many potshots at well-meaning liberal celebrities and was, at points, hilarious. But the satire here is all ham-fisted, and it's explained to us before, during and after, just in case we don't get it. That's why we get, for instance, a scene establishing (via a musical production number) that all college professors are '60s radicals eager to teach their students to hate America; another establishing that all college protests are populated by blank-eyed students who chant talking points because it prevents them from having to think; another that invokes George Clooney's Goodnight, and Good Luck only to sneer at it, without adding any actual, you know, humor; another in which lawyers from the ACLU, made up to look like zombies, invade a courtroom and try to take the Ten Commandments off the wall, only to be repelled by machine gun fire from a judge played by Dennis Hopper. This is all before a search of a would-be suicide bomber's bag is stopped for constitutional reasons, enabling that bad guy to blow himself up with impunity. (Ha, ha, ha.) And then, of course, Patton tells us what it all means. It's all for nothing if the ghosts can't tell us what it all means.

You also get a scene of Neville Chamberlain eagerly polishing Hitler's shoes, a time-paradox joke where Malone finds out that thanks to the erasure of the Civil War he now owns Gary Coleman, and a guest appearance by Paris Hilton. Whee.

Again, all of this could have been funny. David Zucker has contributed to some of the funniest movies of the past few decades, but his eagerness to cram in as many anti-liberal talking points as possible, whether they make any sense or not, utterly trumps his responsibility to make the movie work as a comedy. There's no timing. Nothing's funny, not the political points, not the slob humor, not even the fat-guy-falling-down jokes. Honestly: There were 20 people in the theater at which this reviewer saw it, and there was no laughter at any time. The only audible sound of appreciation at any point was a woman saying, "Hey, that's Bill O'Reilly." It's worth noting that, on his show at least, this movie's Bill O'Reilly is calm and rational and patient and utterly measured in his response to any guest he differs with, even when they're as crazy as this movie's ranting "Rosie O' Connell" (ha, ha, ha). (He later slaps Malone around, but that's too little too late.)

The weenie liberal reviewer trying to give the benefit of the doubt to this artifact from an alien culture with a different belief system was perfectly willing to say, "I don't like your movie, because I don't think a single moment in it is funny, but you don't deserve anything worse than a bad review." And then something happened. The ghost of George Washington brings Malone to Ground Zero on 9/11. Our slob hero stumbles, with horror, into a landscape clouded with dust, with the skeletal wreckage of the World Trade Center looming in the background. And then he gets whomped in the head, multiple times, for laughs. That's right. An American Carol uses the site of the catastrophe still burning in recent memory to play Three Stooges with the fat guy.

Even that could have been funny, I suppose. My editor, reacting to a stronger expression of disgust in the first draft of this piece, points out that if The Producers made jokes about the Holocaust work, there must be a number of filmmakers capable of coming up with something funny about 9/11 that would have justified the hubris of going there. I'll buy that, I suppose. But An American Carol doesn't even have what it takes to make a "fat guy eats something gross" joke work. Do you really expect something better from its treatment of 9/11, or from a subsequent hypothetical future about thousands of dead in Michigan?

Really. This film is beyond unfunny. It's awful.